Daisy held her palms up and shook her head. “You must.” She pushed her hands forward, forcing the necklace closer to Jane.
Jane gently pushed back. “No, I cannot.” Would not. “That is a…” She paused. “…kind,” Peculiarly odd. “Gesture.”
Then the woman’s chocolate brown eyes went wide, giving her the look of a night owl startled from his perch. “You love your husband.” She spoke with the same shock and awe of a person who’d just been told the world was, indeed, round.
Desperate to be free of this painfully awkward and too intimate discussion with this stranger, Jane cast a glance about. When she looked once more at the duchess, she found her patiently waiting, with a soft, almost sorrowful smile on her lips. Jane curled her fingers tightly about the necklace and welcomed the bite of the pendant into the fabric of her gloves. “I…do.” Those words dragged from her, were a hopeful bid to quell the woman’s probing questions.
She gave her a gentle smile. “I once believed my husband did not love me.”
At that intimate revelation from her, a stranger, she stiffened. Then, a duchess was permitted that bold confidence and strength. Jane weighed the chain in her palm. “It is unusual to find a peer who believes in those sentiments.” And yet the Duchess of Crawford did.
That glimmer lit her kindly eyes. “Nobles are to wed for marital connections and power and not much more, you think?”
She lifted her shoulders in a little shrug. “I do not know what a nobleman or lady should believe or do.” As soon as those revealing words about her origins left her lips, she bit the inside of her cheek hard. “I’m merely a companion,” she finished lamely. “I was not born to your world.” She glanced over the duchess’ small shoulders to the doorway. “I really should leave.” She should never have come. To London. To Gabriel’s home. Jane again held out the necklace.
Her Grace folded her hands behind her back, her meaning clear: she’d not take the piece.
“Surely, it matters to you more?” she asked, in a last bid to make the woman see reason.
“I searched for this necklace through the streets of Gipsy Hill. Do you know who found it?”
She shook her head.
“My husband.”
Of course. The heart of a duke, located and gifted by the duke of her heart. How very fitting, and—“It is all the more reason that you cannot simply give it to me, a mere stranger.”
Daisy looped her arm through Jane’s and gently steered her over to the door. “I’ve kept this pendant longer than I had a right to. It represented the talisman I hung my hopes upon after…” A flash of sadness lit her eyes and the muscles of her throat worked. “After a very difficult time.”
Curiosity struck, but Jane quickly tamped down the sentiment. As one who valued and protected her own past and privacy, this woman’s world was her own, and she’d not infringe any more than she already had.
The duchess gently disentangled the necklace from Jane’s fingers and then turned her about. “When you look at me, Jane, you likely see a duchess. Perhaps a noblewoman to be feared.” Yes, those lofty nobles had never given her much reason to trust them or their intentions. She placed the cool chain about Jane’s neck and fiddled with the clasp. “But I’m no different than you. I’m merely a woman who desired love.”
A painful swell of emotion climbed Jane’s throat and choked off words. A woman who desired love. She pressed her eyes closed. This woman, in one swift exchange no more than a handful of moments, should look into her soul and see the truths she kept from even herself. Since she’d been a girl in the nursery, she’d longed for the love and attention of someone—her mother, her nonexistent father, a servant, anyone. And now she was married to a man who, by his own admission, never would or could love her. The faint click of the clasp at last catching filled the room and brought her eyes open.
“There,” the duchess murmured.
Jane touched the filigree heart. “I don’t want the heart of a duke,” she said, her voice whisper soft, wrenched from within her. I only want Gabriel’s heart.